Guillermo del Toro brings his anatomy lesson to Netflix

Guillermo del Toro He is an accidental Prometheus. A filmmaker who loves the fantastic unconditionally, but who has achieved a prestige and access to budgets that his B-movie masters didn't even dare dream of, turning his own labors of love in definitive manifestos that, without intending to, challenge the memory of their references. It is logical, then, that the Mexican director has materialized a version of Frankenstein Longer, more romantic, and more bombastic than any previous adaptation of Mary Shelley's book… But with a sense of wonder dwarfed by the industrial logic of Netflix, entirely uninterested in iconic posterity.

Divided into two sections, the film focuses first on Victor Frankenstein, played with passionate arrogance by Oscar Isaac. The paradigm of the mad scientist, he disobeys common sense to go where no one has before, creating new life from carefully chopped and reassembled corpses, while del Toro takes the opportunity to draw up an atlas of those scientific resources that time has given a morbid character, from anatomical Venuses to Taules. In the second segment, it is the Child who tells her side of the story, expressing herself with the eloquence she exhibits in Shelley's pages and of which cinema usually deprives her. Giving her a voice is a decision consistent with the sympathy that the director of The Shape of Water Being so strange, and according to which, the Baby cannot be merely a symbol of atrocity. Its violence is nothing more than a sublimated expression of the bewilderment and suffering of any living being, feelings perfectly encapsulated by the imposing yet vulnerable figure of Jacob Elordi. The director allows for a benign final twist: the reconciliation between Frankenstein and the Baby. An unusual gesture, but not as moving as the pure, marvelous embrace the monster and his creator share upon discovering each other. An exceptional moment in which Del Toro demonstrates his understanding of life (almost) as well as death.